On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris early in the morning . The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine , through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.
No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground. If you haven't seen this before it is a classic, if you have seen it I apologize, but it's still a classic. I don't remember going through the Louvre quite that fast before.
H/T Shelly
3 comments:
Nice! Thanks!
The route mapped: http://virtualglobetrotting.com/map/12118/
Thanks a lot, this is the greatest video clip ever, and I've not seen it for a couple of years since it was taken off Youtube.
One small point. I hate to spoil things, but they didn't use a Ferrari. It was filmed from the front bumper of an early 60's Mercedes saloon and the sound track was dubbed on afterwards. If anything, I think this makes the driver even more skilled because it would have been much harder to have driven like this in lumbering old Merc than in a Ferrari.
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